The Quantum Thief

‘Yes, I remember this,’ says Antonia. She is not old at all, at least not in appearance: in her third or fourth body, perhaps, a petite dark-skinned woman with Indian features. Her shop is bright and orderly, with Xanthean designer jewellery displayed alongside the timepieces. She immediately printed out a tempmatter instantiation of the co-memory, weighing it in her hands, tapping it with a bright red fingernail.

‘It would have been years ago,’ she says, ‘twenty Earth years maybe, judging by the design. The customer wanted a special little mechanism, you could hide something inside it and open it by pressing a combination of letters. A gift to a lover, probably.’

‘Do you, by any chance, remember anything about the person who bought it?’ Isidore asks.

The woman shakes her head.

‘It’s shop gevulot, you know – we rarely get to keep that sort of thing. I’m afraid not. People tend to be very private about their Watches.’ She frowns. ‘However – I’m pretty sure there was a whole series of these. Nine of them. Very similar designs, all for the same customer. I can give you the schematics, if you like.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Isidore says. Antonia nods, and suddenly his head is full of complex mechanical and quantum computing design diagrams, along with another headache jolt. As he blinks at the pain, Antonia smiles at him. ‘I hope Justin did not scare you,’ she says. ‘This is a lonely profession – long hours, not much appreciation – sometimes he gets a little carried away, especially with young men like you.’

‘Sounds like being a detective,’ Isidore says.

Isidore has lunch at a small floating restaurant in Mont-golfiersville and gathers his thoughts. Even here, he is recognised – apparently his involvement in Unruh’s carpe diem party has been prominently reported by the Herald – but he is too preoccupied with the Watches to hide from every curious glance with gevulot. Hardly tasting his pumpkin quiche, he goes through the designs in his mind.

They are all identical, except for the engravings. Bonitas. Magnitudo. Eternitas. Potestas. Sapientia. Voluntas. Virtus. Veritas. Gloria. Goodness, Greatness, Eternity, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, Glory. None of them qualities he would immediately associate with Jean le Flambeur. But they do suggest that the Unruh affair was not some random impulse to play games with Oubliette barbarians, as the millenniaire suspected. Clearly, le Flambeur has some connection to Mars, one stretching back twenty years at least.

Drinking coffee and looking at the view of the city below, he spends an hour ’blinking at the words. In combination, they appear in medieval texts, Raymond Lull’s Dignities of God from the 13th century, with some connections to the sephiroths of Kabbalistic tradition and the lost art of … memory. One of Lull’s followers was Giordano Bruno, who perfected the art of memory palaces, of storing mental images in physical locations, as if outside the mind. That, at least, is a connection that resonates. The Oubliette exomemory does the same thing, stores everything thought, experienced and sensed in a location in the ubiquitous computing machinery around it.

The shape of it feels right, but he is not sure if it is just pattern matching, like seeing faces in the clouds. Then the memory fragment about the architectural drawings comes back.

Another ’blink – looking for memory palaces – reveals that there was a series of architectural pieces commissioned by the Voice twenty years ago. Nine reflections on memory, by an architect called Paul Sernine.

All the palaces are located in the Maze, relatively close to each other, but the public exomemories about them are old, and Isidore is forced to do some footwork to find them.

The first piece he comes across is near a Maze marketplace, squeezed between a synagogue and a small public fabber centre. It is completely bizarre. The size of a small house, it is made from some black, smooth material. It consists of geometric surfaces, planes, cubes, stuck together in a seemingly haphazard fashion: still, he can sense that there is some order to its structure. And the surfaces do form spaces resembling rooms and hallways, only oddly distorted as if by a funhouse mirror. A plaque near what could be called an entrance has a small plaque that says Eternitas.

The structure looks like something designed by an algorithmic process, rather than a human being. And parts of it look fuzzy, as if the surfaces continued to fork and divide fractally beyond the human range of vision. On the whole, it looks rather forbidding. Someone local has made the black interior slightly less sinister and tomblike by placing a few flower-pots inside: vines have grown to curl around the jutting spikes and surfaces to find light.